Change's Journal

lindenschmidt @ 12:54pm: Renascent Liberalism
I've been reading an essay called "Renascent Liberalism" by John Dewey, which is the third and last chapter of his book Liberalism and Social Action. I find it to be very relevant to the spirit of this list. The essay begins thus:

Nothing is blinder than the supposition that we live in a society and world so static that either nothing new will happen or else it will happen because of the use of violence. Social change is here as a fact, a fact having multifarious forms and marked in intensity. Changes that are revolutionary in effect are in process in every phase of life. Transformations in the family, the church, the school, in science and art, in economic and political relations, are occurring so swiftly that imagination is baffled in attempt to lay hold of them. Flux does not have to be created. But it does have to be directed. It ahs to be so controlled that it will move to some end in accordance with the principles of life, since life itself is development. Liberalism is committed to an end that is at once enduring and flexible: the liberation of individuals so that realization of their capacites may be the law of their life. It is committed to the use of freed intelligence as the method of directing change.

So for Dewey, change is inevitable, the question is how best to direct change. And he advocates "free intelligence" over force. This text was written in 1935, and it's interesting to see how things have progressed since then. I would argue that they haven't. Free intelligence, or more specifically free thinkers, have a sort of social stigma attached to them in the eyes of the common populace; one must only look at the thinly-veiled contempt for the ivory-tower scholar out of touch with the real world. The intelligentsia is distrusted, and perhaps with good reason. Academia has done little to deserve any other opinion.

In this context, the struggle of Intellectual Property becomes even more vivid. Intellectual labor should be used to produce public good, not private profit. Until we as a society get over the notion that the highest good one can achieve is to establish themselves in a role of economic dominance over others, we are in trouble.

lindenschmidt @ 4:13am: How Do I Best Enact Change?
It has occured to me that this (how do I best enact change?) is the central question of my life, on so many different levels.

I look in my immediate surroundings, in my close community of family and friends, and I see much that gives me hope. I see progressive people progressing, I see people speaking and living their truth, and I see people using their minds to best understand the world and their place in it.

But when I look beyond my immediate community, the best I can hope for is to see other communities like mine. The big picture is depressing. We have greedy warmongers mustering the resources of our nation to bomb brown people. We have millions of individuals, mostly isolated from one another except through the mass media, where all the conversation is one-way, who are supporting them. We have people near my home destroying Harry Potter books, because they're Of The Devil. And so on, and so on.

And around me, I see people I care about occasionally making destructive choices. But what can I say? The likelihood of them listening to me seems small. My inclination is to live and let live, realize that everyone is on their path and that they will learn what they need to learn ... eventually. Is it my place to point out some things and maybe help them on their way? Perhaps I can even learn something in the process.

At bottom, this was Zarathustra's problem in the Prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. When you come down off the mountain, with your precious little chunk of enlightenment, what can be done to communicate it? The answer seems to be: not much.  

lindenschmidt @ 1:58am: What about Intellectual Property?
We are in an intellectual property crisis. Current IP laws, and more laws under development, are pointing to a draconian future in terms of regulation of information flow. This seems to be culminating in the TCPA/Palladium technology that is under development by Intel and Microsoft.

If such technology is implemented and widely adopted, there will be an infrastructure in place that allows completely centralized control of all computers connected to the Internet. Yet few "average people" know about this situation. Many of the geeks/developers I know think it to be absurd, and that it will never take off. But look at the odds: those who know don't think it possible, and those who don't know are the vast majority. It is quite possible that, step by step, access to our information will be taken away from us.

What can we do about this? When I talk about it to my non-geek friends, they think I'm paranoid and delusional. But this seems very real to me, and I must confess I worry about it quite a bit. This seems like one area where enacting change would be relatively easy.

weezyl @ 7:04pm: How much of it is the process of marketing? Ultimately, in order to make change desirable, or even proffer the idea that it's inevitable, you'll need to seriously market the type of change you want to see occur - and that is difficult to do without deep pockets or connections in places to make that marketing easier. Is making change fundamentally a marketing skill?

If so, how do you deal with that?

bigbaldguy @ 6:31pm: First-person accounts and public awareness
This article requires a subscription, but caught my eye.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/11/20/cole/index.html

This article is about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a closed court which approves requests by the Justice Department to gather foreign intelligence, i.e. spy on people.

The standard for gathering intelligence is much lower than the standard for criminal prosecution. In particular, the government need not show probable cause to get this closed court to grant permission to spy.

In particular, the following passage caught my eye:

That seemingly cozy relationship was strained two years ago, though, when the government admitted to 75 instances in which errors were made when it sought FISA applications... citing that "alarming number of instances" of having been misled, the FISA judges unanimously rejected the Justice Department's attempt to broaden FISA's reach under the PATRIOT Act.

Each of these 75 "instances" are actually people whose rights were violated by government officials claiming that national security was at stake. What if someone created a website or publication which documented the first-person accounts of these and other such people?

lindenschmidt @ 9:34pm: change is inevitable
The first task of enacting change, methinks, is convincing people that change is not only good and necessary, but inevitable. The question is, what sort of change will we accept? And what changes will we resist or reject?

bigbaldguy @ 6:28pm: Some links
On the nature of American empire:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/321/focus/The_phantom_empire+.shtml

Growing Power:
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6611

bigbaldguy @ 6:18pm: How do we each best make change?

Before you rectify the state, you must first rectify yourself.
-- Confucius

From the political to the mystical, we live in a world of filth and magic. Recent events, and omens of events yet to come, have given us a warning.

What do we do with this?